I have just finished examining for the Balliol Scholarships:  a great institution of which you may possibly have heard.  To what shall I liken it?  It is not unlike a man casting into the sea a great dragnet, and when it is full of fish, pulling it up again and taking out fishes, good, bad and indifferent, and throwing the bad and indifferent back again into the sea.  Among the good fish there have been Archbishop Tait, Dean Stanley, A. H. Clough, Mr. Arnold, Lord Coleridge, Lord Justice Bowen, Mr. Ilbert, &c., &c., &c.  The institution was founded about sixty years ago.

I have been dining alone rather dismally, and now I shall imagine that I receive a visit from a young lady about twenty-three years of age, who enlivens me by her prattle.  Is it her or her angel?  But I believe that she is an angel, pale, volatile and like Laodamia in Wordsworth, ready to disappear at a moment’s notice.  I could write a description of her, but am not sure that I could do her justice.

I wish that I could say anything to comfort you, my dear Margot, or even to make you laugh.  But no one can comfort another.  The memory of a beautiful character is “a joy for ever,” especially of one who was bound to you in ties of perfect amity.  I saw what your sister [Footnote:  Mrs. Gordon Duff.] was from two short conversations which I had with her, and from the manner in which she was spoken of at Davos.

I send you the book [Footnote:  Plato’s Republic] which I spoke of, though I hardly know whether it is an appropriate present; at any rate I do not expect you to read it.  It has taken me the last year to revise and, in parts, rewrite it.  The great interest of it is that it belongs to a different age of the human mind, in which there is so much like and also unlike ourselves.  Many of our commonplaces and common words are being thought out for the first time by Plato.  Add to this that in the original this book is the most perfect work of art in the world.  I wonder whether it will have any meaning or interest for you.

You asked me once whether I desired to make a Sister of Charity of you.  Certainly not (although there are worse occupations); nor do I desire to make anything.  But your talking about plans of life does lead me to think of what would be best and happiest for you.  I do not object to the hunting and going to Florence and Rome, but should there not be some higher end to which these are the steps?  I think that you might happily fill up a great portion of your life with literature (I am convinced that you have considerable talent and might become eminent) and a small portion with works of benevolence, just to keep us in love and charity with our poor neighbours; and the rest I do not grudge to society and hunting.  Do you think that I am a hard taskmaster?  Not very, I think.  More especially as you will not be led away by my good advice.  You see that I cannot bear to think of you hunting and ballet-dancing when you are “fair, fat and forty-five.”  Do prepare yourself for that awful age.